'200,000 Tickets Sold; Excited For The World To Fall In Love With Women's Cricket': Barrett-Wild

200,000 tickets sold; excited for the world to fall in love with womens cricket: Barrett-Wild (Image Source: IANS)

T20 World Cup: Beth Barrett‑Wild, tournament director of the 2026 Women’s T20 World Cup, said she is excited for a nation "to fall in love with women’s cricket” as ticket sales for the 12-team mega event have touched the 200,000 mark.

Billed as the biggest-ever Women’s T20 World Cup, the tenth edition of the tournament will see 33 games being played around seven venues. The competition will start on June 12 in Edgbaston and end on July 5 at Lord’s.

"We have been building towards this moment probably for at least 12 months, but between 12 to 18 months now. We have set out with really big ambitions for this tournament. Our vision is to bring women's cricket into the mainstream.

"That is all about scale and status and real perception shifts around the women's game. We really want a nation in the world to really fall in love with women's cricket this summer and to recognise the world-class quality that it epitomises now," Beth told IANS in an exclusive conversation ahead of the competition on Thursday.

England are hosting a Women's T20 World Cup for the first time since 2009. "We have been building over the last year, 12 months and there's a very detailed operational plan that has gone into that from a kind of event delivery perspective. That's all of the stuff you'd expect around venue operations.

“One of our key objectives for this tournament actually is around player satisfaction. So we wanna make sure the players have the best possible experience and sort of our KPIs is around that player experience point. That's everything from their travel and accommodation through to the facilities that they're gonna be playing and training at through the tournament.

“There's been a lot of attention to detail on that, but also a lot of work going in behind the scenes and off-field around and really growing the audience for the women's game, especially across England and Wales," she added.

The tournament has an ambition to sell 270,000 tickets, and surpass the box office sales done during the iconic 2020 edition in Australia, which famously concluded with a sold-out final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Beth, who played hockey and cricket before joining the England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB) in 2013, said that benchmark itself was a reflection of how far the women's game had progressed.

"We've got big ticketing ambitions and actually just broke through 200,000 tickets for this event. So we're actually going after around 270,000 attendances in total, which would be double the previous highest attended Women's T20 World Cup, which was the iconic one in Australia back in 2020 with the amazing scenes at the MCG back then.

“But we wanna double the total attendance here and that just shows how much the women's game has grown now and actually the really solid foundations that we're coming into this tournament from having had that kind of global exposure, but then also at a local level recently through things like The Hundred and the growth of the women's team," she said.

On the insights ticket sales have shown so far, Beth revealed that 36 percent of ticket purchases for this tournament had been made by women. “We've had to look really carefully at this – like the female toilets, because a lot of our venues, the way that they're set up from a historic fan and audience perspective for cricket, it is a traditionally very male-dominated audience.

“For men's cricket, that is still absolutely the case. So we know, for example, for an England men's fixture, roughly 80 percent of ticket purchases will be male. Whereas for this Women's T20 World Cup, we're seeing, I think, 36 percent of ticket purchases are female. So that's our highest percentage of female ticket purchases across any of our products - whether that's England Men's Test cricket, T20 cricket, The Hundred and etc.

“36 percent female ticket purchases for this World Cup is the highest percentage there. We're around 23 percent kids' tickets. - that's slightly lower than The Hundred as it's played in the heart of our school summer holidays and it very much is targeting that family audience.

“Whereas actually I think for the Women's T20 World Cup in terms of our audience strategy, yes, it is. I think women's cricket and women's sport naturally entices a slightly more female and younger demographic, but that's not been our sole focus," she said.

She outlined four distinct audience groups the tournament was targeting: "devotees" already engaged with cricket in all formats; "all format fans" open to the women's game; "cricket converts" drawn in through The Hundred; and "bandwagoners" who simply love a major event and hope to see more of them in rest of the summer.

"But I think it's really important actually in terms of our audience segmentation – it's not all about going after a new audience. A lot of it actually is about just trying to convert our core audience and trying to just shift their perceptions, I suppose. You started there in terms of what 2017 did to help shift perceptions around sports.

“There is still a perception gap that we're trying to close. So it's actually one of our big key and long-term KPIs is that we wanna close the perception that cricket is still a primarily male-dominated sport. We know that of UK sports fans, 40 percent of those still primarily view cricket primarily as a sport for men and boys in this country and we wanna close that gap," she said.

Organisers are targeting a six percent reduction in the number of fans who view cricket as primarily a male sport, aiming instead for a perception of it as gender-equal. “We wanna see a 6 percent increase in the number of fans that view cricket as a gender equal sport.

“There's a big perception shift still to be done and the audience profile of the fans that we're gonna be attracting to the venues is a big part of that. It's not to say that we're trying to educate them. I think we're just trying to showcase what a world-class proposition women's cricket is now,” added Beth.

She further explained how the tournament’s broadcast quality would play a key role in that perception shift, with the ICC deploying a 30-plus camera operation including drones, spider cams and buggy cams - the same production standard used for a men's global event.

"What you'd expect for a men's game, we're gonna see through this tournament. But then also some of the storytelling that we'll do through the analytics will be really showcasing how women's cricket is not any less good than the men's cricket.

“It's just different and we know, for example, we've got some amazing stats that show that there's just more precision and control in the women's game. So from a bowling perspective, more of a higher percentage of deliveries go on to hit the stumps and that's really cool just because it's just different, right?

“The modes of dismissal, therefore, are different. There's a statistic as well that says that definitely in T20 cricket, there are more twos run in the women's game than there are in the men's game.

“So we're gonna highlight and showcase that and try to get people excited about that. It's just a journey that we need to take fans on in terms of really highlighting exactly how good the women's game is now and using data and insight and production quality in a way to hopefully do that," she said.

The tournament's campaign slogan, "Catch the Spirit", reflects what Beth described as the infectious and unique character of pulling more fans towards women's cricket. "We have big ambitions for it. It's personally something that I'm incredibly proud of to be a part of and I know the team, I think, are as well (feeling the same).

“So we're gonna highlight and showcase that and try to get people excited about that. It's just a journey that we need to take fans on in terms of really highlighting exactly how good the women's game is now and using data and insight and production quality in a way to hopefully do that," she said.

“It's about really making sure that we're using the tournament to shift thinking, feeling, behaviour and perceptions of women's cricket long-term. I'm just really, really excited for the world to fall in love with women's cricket this summer," she concluded.

Article Source: IANS